Ken Levine Hearts The PC

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Blessim. As part of Kotaku’s ‘PC gaming week’ (so does that make it okay for them to largely ignore the PC for the other 51 weeks of the year?), BioShock/System Shock 2/SWAT 4-brain Ken Levine has penned an impassioned paean to the humble IBM compatible. The source of the greatest developers, the undying home of innovation, the bright, ever-changing future of videogames: that sort of thing. “Magic can happen when there are no middle men, no marketers, and no naysayers,” quoth he. He’s absolutely right, y’know.

Plus he name-checks this cool PC gaming site you might have heard of, which is very sweet of him. And means he might be reading this. Hmm. Hi Ken! Please make sure Infinite’s PC version is the best version!

True enough on the question of FOV, which was quite disappointing – especially when Bioshock 2 repeated the same obvious failings as the original. But it’s utter rubbish to claim that Bioshock 1 and 2 didn’t support mouse input without some ini-fiddling.

A large part of the gaming press liked to make out, during Bioshock’s development, that Levine was somehow a new kid on the block, where in fact he had been involved with the seminal SWAT series, and even Freedom Force, which is cast-iron proof that Irrational are capable of stuff other than Bioshock!

As to the article, it’s nice and all, but Levine mentioning that the PC is the arena for unmitigated creativity serves to highlight that his studio could certainly do more to take advantage of that. It would be nice to see games from them of lesser scope, ala what Double Fine are doing with their own spread of games. Downloadable stuff, mainly. Why just focus on the huge, blockbuster projects?

lol, i loved that game sooooooo much……. the first one at least. never could get into the second one all that much, though i did steal everything in the castle floor….did you guys ever plant the silver sapling by the grey goblin place and murder them all? ahhh, memories……..

For all the crying about how PC games are dying, take a look at page 106 of the EA annual report.

PC games were almost 700 million revenue in 2010 fiscal, compared with PS3 of 771 million, and Wii of 570 million. Even the XBox 360 was “only” 868 million, within shooting range of the PC. If you look at any of the consoles individually as a platform, most of them are similar to the PC as a platform. The DS/PSP/mobile platforms TOGETHER did not even touch the PC platform.

The problem seems to come from most charts only recording sales as retail sales, and ignoring the digital sales. Therefore, people see that the PC version appears to be drastically underselling compared to consoles – which quite clearly isn’t true.

In fact, I am very surprised at EA’s figures – given that most people probably buy the sports titles on console, rather than the half arsed PC versions, then I would have expected a greater disparity between the PC and console revenue.

It also demonstrates that the “so called” prevalence and ease of piracy on PC has little impact on revenue ….

Mark Skaggs says:
“The future may also bring a new form of digital family board game night. Why play Monopoly with your Mom and Dad, when you can play a game with your entire extended family across the world, at any time?”

This man doesn’t even know what the word “social” means anymore, does he?

Have to say, I still think Ken Levine is a brilliant guy, no matter how badly I felt burned by BioShock. His article is by far the smartest of those on Kotaku this week so far, too. Cevat Yerli and that douchey Zynga guy have their somewhat credible predictions, but “Fuck if I know” is probably the wisest stance to take on the question, and is also exactly the reason PC gaming remains so exciting. I know plenty of people are tired of hearing about Minecraft, but it’s a perfect example of this sort of thing. Nobody could have ever seen that one coming, and there’s not a chance in hell it could have come from anywhere other than PC gaming.

Agree with him that one of the PCs main strengths is the low entry barrier for new ideas but the problem with this at the moment is many interesting indie games start development on pc, show proof of concept, do the indie expo circuit, draw some attention and then get ‘poached’ by xbla or psn only showing up on the pc months or years later. This happened with braid, limbo and recently super meatboy (only a months wait thankfuly). Now while the pc gamer in me gnashes his teeth at how ‘ungrateful’ and ‘two faced’ this behaviour is, I recognise its just that xbla and psn have platform holders that can provide major support to indie devs trying to ship their first game and the pc doesnt really have a good answer to that. Hopefully this will change once people realise steam is to big a market to ignore.

Still, really nice to see someone in the industry that can so forcefully articulate the strengths of the format:)